She was to observe still more closely the world’s practices. An acquaintance of the family, one Mademoiselle d’Hannaches, was in difficulty over an inheritance and obliged to be in Paris to work up her case. Madame Phlipon took her into her house, where she stayed some eighteen months. Now Mademoiselle d’Hannaches belonged to an ancient family, and on account of her birth demanded extra consideration from those about her and treated her _bourgeois_ friends with a certain condescension. Manon became a sort of secretary to her and often accompanied her when she went out on business. “I noticed,” wrote Manon afterwards, “that in spite of her ignorance, her stiff manner, her incorrect language, her old-fashioned toilette,—all her absurdities,—deference was paid her because of her family. The names of her ancestors, which she always enumerated, were listened to gravely and were used to support her claim. I compared the reception given to her with that which Madame de Boismorel had given to me and which had made a profound impression upon me. I knew that I was worth more than Mademoiselle d’Hannaches, whose forty years and whose genealogy had not given her the faculty of writing a sensible or legible letter. I began to find the world very unjust and its institutions most extravagant.” Mademoiselle Phlipon had scarcely become accustomed to these vanities in the society which she frequented, before she began to observe equally puzzling and ridiculous pretensions in artistic and literary circles. Through the kindness of her masters and of the friends of M. and Madame Phlipon, she was often invited to the reunions of _bels esprits_, so common in Paris then and now. It was not in a spirit of humiliation and flattered vanity that so independent an observer and judge as she had become, surveyed the celebrities she was allowed to look upon and to listen to, in the various salons to which she was admitted. She saw immediately the pose which characterized nearly all of the gatherings, the pretentious vanity of those who read verses or portraits, the insincerity and diplomacy of those who applauded. The blue-stockings who read as their own verses which they had not always written, and who were paid by ambitious salon leaders for sitting at their table; the small poets who found inspiration in the muffs and snuff-boxes of the great ladies whose favor they wanted; the bold, and not always too chaste, compliments,—verily, if they made the gatherings _délicieuses_, as they who followed them declared, there was a deep gulf between Manon Phlipon’s standards and those of the society which her family congratulated her upon being able to see.